“On Mars, the crust just sits there, and Olympus Mons just grows, and grows, and grows, over billions of years.”
“Sounds great,” I said. “Why don’t we go there?”
“Because Valles Marineris is more likely to contain the answer to the most important question about Mars. Is there any water still there? The valley looks like it could have been formed by running water. But how long ago? Is any still left, frozen in the ground like permafrost in the tundra? The canyon’s an obvious place to look.” Then he smiled a little broader. “Besides, it’s where the Chinese will land.”
He called up a map of Mars on his screen. He jabbed his finger at a point just above the north rim of the Valles.
“Longitude ninety-five degrees, six degrees south latitude. I’ll be able to eyeball the correct landing site, because we’ll be able to see the Chinese pathfinders.”
[332] It was the successful landing of two out of the three “pathfinder” ships on Mars that had finally lit a match under the complacent butts of those in charge of America’s manned space program. One of the ships had failed to respond to commands from Earth and zipped on past Mars and into oblivion. But the other two had landed within half a mile of each other.
“The Chinese have to land there, they’ve got no choice. So I will come down at the landing site they announced to the world. I’ll find the supply ships and put down within a couple miles of them. And then… then, my friends, we’ve got them.
“We’re going to hijack the Chinese mission.”
And he explained his plan to force the Chinese to acknowledge our presence on Mars… and soon we were all grinning with him. It sounded foolproof to me.
Providing, of course, that we didn’t kill ourselves during our landing.
TRAVIS FIRED A long burst to slow us out of Mars orbit, then we were weightless again for what felt like three hours but really wasn’t nearly so long.
Once again the four of us were strapped to our chairs in the windowless control deck. There was a cruciform cursor superposed on our aft-looking cameras, the ones that would be giving Travis his only useful view of where he was going. The cursor was right on the knife edge of the western reaches of the Valles Marineris. Of course we were also using our radar to judge altitude, but radar was one of the weak points of Red Thunder. To keep our costs under one million-okay, in the final accounting we had spent more like $1,150,000 of Travis’s and Kelly’s money-the great majority of the ship was built with parts purchased off the shelf, from the tanks the ship was made out of, right down to our pressurized ball point pens, an item NASA had once spent almost three million dollars to develop. But good civilian radar equipment that would meet our needs was hard to come by. We wanted to be able to bounce signals off Mars and the Earth while still hundreds or thousands [333] of miles away, and would need even more range if we had to find a crippled and lost Ares Seven.
Our radar equipment had been scavenged from an Air Force airplane graveyard, from the nose of an old fighter plane. It was the best we could do.
It seemed to be functioning well as we descended, the numbers flickering down rapidly on my screen. Ten miles. Nine miles. Eight miles. More and more detail appearing on the screen. I made myself relax, breathing steadily. Not for the first time on this trip, I wondered if I was really cut out to be a spaceman. My stomach was protesting all the changes in gravity as Travis nursed the big, awkward contraption down to her destiny on the Red Planet.
Three miles. Two miles.
The terrain undulated gently in a washboard pattern created by the dust storms that periodically swept Mars from pole to pole, and could last months. If one had been happening when we arrived we would have been out of luck, orbiting for no more than a week before we’d be forced to go home. But the air was clear as glass.
One mile. Half a mile.
“There they are!” Kelly shouted. I followed her pointing finger to a screen showing two regular shapes in the sea of shallow craters and rocks of every size.
“I see them,” Travis said in our headphones. “Please don’t holler so loud.”
“Sorry,” Kelly said.
One thousand feet. Five hundred feet. Travis meant to land us someplace where the Chinese might not spot us on the way down. It wasn’t critical that we not be seen, but it would help. The Chinese were following the pattern of the Russians during the Soviet Union days, landing completely on automatic, just like the pathfinder ships. Communists apparently just hated to relinquish any control they didn’t have to, so Soviet and now Chinese cosmonauts had to be content to let machines handle chores that our own “Right Stuff” astronauts would have claimed as their own.
[334] “One hundred feet,” Travis called out. “Picking up some dust. Fifty feet. Thirty feet. Fifty feet to starboard. Still thirty feet elevation.” There had been a big rock at the spot Travis had been about to land on. He moved over, then again. Twenty feet. Ten feet.
“I have a touchdown signal on strut two, Captain,” Dak said. Then, quickly, “Touchdown on strut one… and strut three.”
“Cabin listing less than two degrees,” I called out.
“Air systems four by four,” Alicia shouted.
“Cutting power,” Travis said, and the roar of the engines-not nearly so loud in the thin atmosphere of Mars-tapered off and died. I kept my eyes glued to the tilt-meter, which settled another degree, then half of a degree. If tilt exceeded five degrees I was to recommend another liftoff and touchdown… something Travis could of course see and do from his own instruments. But on a ship you back everything up.
The meter stabilized.
“We’re down, guys and gals,” Travis shouted from above.
Somebody should have thought to bring some ticker tape and confetti. We made up for the lack by cheering our lungs out.
We had made it. We were on Mars.
FIRST WE ALL had to crowd into the cockpit, wearing our bomber jackets and big, goofy grins. Kelly the shutterbug took pictures of us. The view was stunning. I’m a Florida boy who’s never been anywhere. There was nothing like this in Florida. Not a speck of green to be seen anywhere. Rocks everywhere you looked, though this spot wasn’t as stony as the places where previous Mars probes had landed. It was midday, and the sky was a pale pinkish on the horizon and a deep blue straight up. Wisps of high cloud so thin you could barely see them. Dust, I think, not water.
The external thermometer was reading minus eight degrees, Fahrenheit.
“Time to suit up, don’t you think?” Travis said. He got no argument. We all trooped down to the crossroads deck and then down into the suit room.
[335] I don’t know if Dak and Kelly and Alicia were holding their breaths, as I was. We’d never discussed this part of the journey.
Who gets to be first? Who gets the headline in the history books, and who ends up in the fine print? Travis was the captain, so didn’t he have the right to be first? But, being the captain, didn’t he have an obligation to stay with his ship? And if he did, who would tell him? I wasn’t eager to try.
“You kids get to be first,” Travis said, and smiled at the guilty looks on our faces. “Sure, I’ve thought about it. But, plain truth, none of this would have happened without you four. And Mars belongs to the young. And… well, hell! Get your suits on before I change my mind and beat y’all out the door!”
We didn’t need more prompting. We all set new records getting into the things. Then down into the lock, Travis sealing the hatch behind us. Final suit checks, buddying each other. Then cycle the lock, watch the pressure equalize with the breath of carbon dioxide gas outside, and open the outer lock door.